How to Draw and Color a Cartoon Monster - Step by Step

1. Introduction Video Skillshare Version: Hello, everyone. My name is Robert Marcelo and welcome to my class how to draw in color a cartoon monster. In this class, you work with me from sketch to finish colors, all enrolled time work with drawing process and talk about things like gesture proportions and refining our concepts makes you learn how to think the line work. I'll show you how to create smooth lines as well as lying variation. Add style to our design. After that will begin to color our creature concept. You'll learn about using selections to generate shapes of shadows and highlights. I'll show you how to build up upon the coloring process to create dynamic effects. The main goal here is to make the creature look as three dimensional is possible. I'll be using sketchbook pro to demonstrate these lessons, but the same techniques can be used with the variety of programs or traditional art as well . I hope you're excited to take this class, and I'd be happy to see your completed project file as well as give any constructive criticism I can offer. Thank you for stopping by and, as always, keep drawn. Keep em, Bond and I will talk to you soon. 2. L1 Proportions of Our Monster: Hey, welcome back in one. Robert Marzel here from AM Studio Comics. So today's ah episode I'm gonna teach you how to draw a cute monster. So this should be fun, eh? So what you want to first start with? Just so you know, I'm using sketchbook Pro. It's currently free at the recording of this class. So if you need it, head on over and grab it. If you're working traditionally than you're ready to get started. Hopefully so first thing that think about is probably shape. So when drawing a cute monster, what I like to do is just throwing some kind of bubbly circle e kind of shapes here. Nothing to exact, you know, just kind of figure out the broad strokes what I might do, Maybe some big feet. You figure out the hands or they, you know, kind of one up to the side. One down, you know, off center of the body. You know, move. The center line of the body is kind of on an angle. Something like that. Maybe he's looking at camera. Eso got a cross section here for the face cross section here for the body. What generally happens if you take the time to maneuver things around, Um, where they're not all facing the, um, camera the same way. Then it generally will look a little bit more advanced. So it's a pretty easy tactic to make something look more impressive. So again, one section of the body towards camera one away. And just like that, you've got something that's a little more interesting. Eso what? The's broad strokes of the character. I want to figure out what they're doing, you know? So maybe this hands kind of open hand polls something like that. Maybe this one's tucked down. Do they even have hands? What is this thing now? In most cases, I would say you go into your design knowing what you're gonna draw right. That seems like it makes the most sense. But when doing cute monsters, I actually don't do. And I just think it's fun. Teoh, uh, see what comes out of it, like I might want to put a horn on this and I might say, Let's just do one horn like one on one side. I don't want to give him two horns and make him look like some little devil type character anything like that. He's a monster, not a not a demon, folks. Eso might put a spike on his tooth coming out of the mouth like that one big spike over here, maybe one little downturn spike. It was kind of cute when some things are, you know, larger on one side, maybe the other side hasn't caught up or something. Kind of funny, maybe a little bit of hair on top. So first off, I get the shape in place, and that's what we're doing here. And then as I start to draw this, that I start to think a little bit more about the story and ah, but it's all about proportions at this point, you know? Like like I said, it probably given some big feet. So try primitive shapes, lots of ovals, lots of quick sweeping lines. Remember to draw through. Don't you know? Don't stop and go at all your lines. It's really draw through and have fun with it and think about expressiveness. So as you do this, maybe you have your babys get little tail here. Um, maybe he's got, you know, one. I It's a little bit smaller again. Kind of this you know, maybe we actually reversals, so let's make the bigger eye on this side, and this could be an expression. But again, it just kind of gives that asymmetrical value that looks kind of cute. And, you know, don't be afraid to really change things that, you know you think might need to look a certain way. So, for instance, if you bring the head down and you just bring out the cheeks just a little bit, you know, that's obviously pretty typical. That looks like something. Seen a lot of cartoons, and there's nothing wrong with that. But you gotta really take nothing off the table. You could try where there's no, uh, transition at all. It's just like right from head to body, right? That's pretty funny and actually like that mawr immediately. So it's It's really kind of thinking away from traditional aspects, I think is always the way that I tend to find my best creature designs. You want some of the expressive miss off a traditional character poles and things like that . But then, as you designed this and get further into it, you want to really throw any sort of, you know, realistic proportions out of the window. So let's try something like this. You know, you could have ah, pointed tail. It could have, you know, ball the spike at the end. There's all sorts of funny things, neat little things we could do there. But right now we just want to get these proportions down. So if you're following along with me, just go ahead and draw what you've seen here. But also, don't be afraid to just create your own creature. You know, notice with hand here will bring that little pinky up and just kind of change it from being just a regular, boring hand polls. And it could easily have all the fingers going together. Little things like just extending that pinky up incorporates a little bit more gesture. So you do want a lot of gesture into your creature Design says Sort of brings them to life . I think so. That gets is our basic proportions. Let's go and head over to the next lesson, where we start to add more details and some attributes to this character and start to bring them to life. 3. L2 Refining Our Monster Concept: Okay, So now for the next stage of this, we want to give him some more details and attributes. So we want to think about things like, you know, is he wearing any kind of clothing or something? Ah, comical. You know, maybe a cut off shirt with the something on it, like some writing. And I always think that's funny. Like it's a monster that's probably furry, but still feels the need to wear some clothes and express them styles. Let's do that. Let's give him a cut off. Sure. We'll just do civil rips around the arms. Maybe a little. Just a little circle for the neck area. Some like that up. A little rips over here. So little things like this are just always fun to dio. Um okay. You know, maybe a little belly button that's always cute. And, uh, I guess he's gonna have shirt. Well, I guess he doesn't need pants. We'll just given legs. I was right. The legs. Okay, so you know, other things we could think about, you see, have kind already established. He's get diesel spikes for fingers. Maybe he's wearing a little ring. I think that it's it's fun to incorporate lots of little details like that. It gives you some neat stuff to color. And when you're doing more simplified drawings, little attributes like that go a long ways. Um, so what else could we do here? Does this character have ears? You know, you could have, like, these little human ears popping out to the side. It's kind of funny. Or maybe like, um, it's a little downturn. Ears like this kind. Like a bit of a dragon or something. Who's weird? Little downturn ears. It almost looks like hair, I guess. Which it could be here. So we'll keep working on this. I definitely like the idea of a little bit of hair right here. Maybe a little flip up or something like that. Give them some. Some possess. And then I also would like to detail this. Ah, spike a little bit more. Maybe some just some ridges or something like that. Those air fun. Teoh detail in the shade. I like to think about this in ways of like, how do I want to color this? I'm always trying to think a few steps ahead. Let's get the eye expression so I kind of picture is looking over and down at us a little bit. So something like that, a little glare in the eye and then you can obviously, you know, already picture. Maybe they're being a little bit colored iris around this. You can do some shading in that as well. Now shading I do usually keep to a minimal on a character like this because I want the color to really express all of that. Um, you seem really giving him a nose. But we could we could throw in a basic shape like that for a nose. I think that what to need about doing this type of stuff is how to draw certain things with his little to no detail and and very minimalistic type of lines. So a nose could be a simple as a little point up, even a spike and then maybe a little nostril. It doesn't have to be very much. In fact, a lot of times of stuff it's gonna work. The best is very simplistic. If you want to be traditional, you can go with something like this. And obviously this is like the most widely used knows for cartoon creatures. But I think we'll make ours a little bit different. Maybe just a little bit of a spike kind of fits the rest of the narrative that's going on with the character already. You know, eyebrows could be a simple those little lines. They don't have to really be eyebrows. They can just kind of hint, and again that gives us something to color later on. Um, I think spikes for the fingers is kind of funny. Looks like this monster that would have, you know, a few spiked nails, that kind of thing. Little fat wrinkles for the overlap of the arm. Let's see for details. Anything else we can attribute. Probably some lines for the tail. Something like that. I think we'll just go with the spiked tail, give it a bit of a curl right there, some of the palm. And there it looks like he's kind of talking with his hands and notice as we bring this line straight down to the shoulders. You know, it just kind of goes right from head to body, right, and that's okay. And that's fun. But we can still incorporate a little bit of cheeks in there if we want as well, so it can be that the neck just widens way out. But he still has these kind of puffy cheeks on the side or whatever. So there it doesn't have to be one of the other, especially as it pertains to monsters. You can really get away with anything you want, so we can't even fit a little Channon like that. Something like that. It's going to move this over, skill him up a little bit more, and this is about the area of the work wall. Start to refine and add a little bit pensive detail just because, like I said, you don't need much in the way of detail. Barely anything. But what you can do is you can really bring out what's there. So actually, this line I don't know why I brought the color of the shirt up to his chin, because really, it's gonna have to go out to the side of his neck. So it's gonna go out like this, and maybe those ribs go right out to that point. Um, other things that we can think about as well, you know, I like to get as much information in with the sketch even though Ah, lot of this could be incorporated in the color and refinement of this work. But little things like texture. So you might have, like a couple little Frankel's. He might have some some spots. You know, maybe is a spotted kind of lizard thinking again. Try to get as much of that in there, even with these rough lines, so that when you go to your next stage, you've got plenty of information toe work from, and it makes your life a lot easier. So again, with the arms weaken to these spots, I think that adds character. Maybe some oval circle things. So it doesn't have to just be one texture, either. It could be a couple kind of like coffee, really study. Ah, alligators. They have lots of neat kind of scale patterns and texture and their skin their very much just a plethora of great information. Oh, and I guess we should probably figure out what his feet look like. I'm thinking just these big, long spikes. They don't have to be entirely pointed. I don't have to look insanely dangerous or anything like that. But one thing I will say that like when they're pointed in different directions. I think that adds a bit more creative feeling to it. A little more energy to the polls. Just like that, We're starting to end up with a cute little creature, you know? And other things you can think about, you could say, Well, what if this creature had a little hat on him or something? I mean, I don't know to keep this, but I just want to show you just get all your experimentation out in the in this stage of the work. I'm still kind of wondered if only, um, some kind of years play with different shapes for the ears again, they could be pointed. It could be appear. I just kind of throw these shapes and and a lot of times, a lot of my work. I sit here in pinball back and forth, but this is where the fun happens, where the ideas happened. The ideas happen in the scribbles. That's always the way I feel about being creative and coming up with stuff like this. It's the part where you were fined too much where you start to lose a little bit of that energy and expressiveness. So get all your ideas worked out in this rough sketch phase and just have fun with it. Eso Let's say it. That's enough. Let's give him a little exclamation point on it. Sure, just so. It's something a little bit, you know. He's making a statement about himself that he's a pretty extreme little monster. Dude. Um, so yes, So let's take this now and let's refine it a bit more and see what we come up with, so let's head over to the next lesson. 4. L3 Inking Our Monster Part 1: Okay, so now for this portion, I want to kind of ink the work. And I could really take this to a painted style, and maybe we'll do some examples of that as well. But I want to show you that just by simply changing the brush setting something gives you a good range of think that then some like that. You can think the work. One of the main things I tend to do here is I'll shoot past the lines of beds. Let me show you kind of tighten up in here. And one of things I might do is put the brush toe where the max size of what I'm looking for is maybe full pressure, you know that I'm placing on the screen. So what could be neat about this way of doing things is you kind of look at it like you're creating just a couple different types of lines, I think, But you're OK with going past it and then maybe a racing bag so you can get some real neat kind of expressive lines. This way, you can also use layers to help you do this, but I'll generally just draw on a race back kind of work through this and show you what I mean. But what happens is instead of getting this kind of boring line over the whole thing, you get a little bit more expressiveness. So you're gonna kind of shoot the line out, connected with overlapping lines. Sometimes we got 10 1 right there and just vary it up. So, like, even right there, that looks pretty good. But I'm just gonna take and knock this edge back just a little bit. So quicker race there. So this is just preference. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's actually like that. I like that little thin there and think they're so little little things like that can go a long ways. Now, obviously, if you're more of a painter, then you're not gonna worry too much about this. This is more for my comic and illustration buddies that, like a little bit more line work in their, uh, their workflow. But again, no right or wrong way. Just do whatever you like eso some of this is judgment calls on. I like doing this. I like leaving some of this. Ah, you know, blank. Here almost like. Okay, wish this line beat. I want something like this on a thicker line there. Let's just go kind of like the 1st 1 Let's go with that. So some of scratching this kind of can seem a bit distracting, but it could be fun to work through it as well. So just kind of clean up the lines as you go. Remember, you can use space bar Teoh quickly move the canvas. We're gonna go down to here, and I should probably make these lines thicker. So whenever you're kind of doing a little bit more of a cartoon style, you're generally going to err on the side of thicker lines. So just be aware that it usually reads better. If you do that, it's tough for me because I actually tend to focus on thinner lines in line variation. But you'll notice with a lot of cartoon styles, are very much into nice, big, heavy, thick lines, which it does lead to expressiveness. I think through easy to get caught up in the minutia of everything. If you just sit there and I try to refine every single line and get this extreme range of line variation. So you want some of these will just be fun and expressive and not too much deliberation involved, I guess. And just remember, if you have a tough time getting clean lines, you might want to practice with speed and what you create them. What makes you gonna break somebody's over without points and then maybe a few more points here. Something like that, I think reads a little better. See, you have the speed. So, for instance, as I get over to his belly here, you know, I might have a tougher time going like this. I'm actually pretty good at re feather on the line like that, but it's a heck of a lot easier just to go. And then without the sound effect, probably and then had another one at another one and maybe a race back. But you see those actually blood together, if that's the right term. But they pulled together in a in a way, where it looks good, don't have to worry too much about I might knock this round over back, or I could add to the bottom like this onto another one. That's probably too thick there. But now I want to show you what I mean about adding a layers when we bring my layers over recon, see him and so friends and say, I want this line here. But I keep getting this weird Taper because really, what I need is the draw through it from way up there, you see, it covers up some of my detail work. I could simply add a layer draw through it like I'm mentioning, go back with the race just like that, and then command E and merging together. Now that might seem a bit time intensive, but I assure you, as you get faster at this stuff, that's not going to be that big of a deal. Kind of want to see a little wrinkle right there will pocket a fat that's always fun, cause it's a cartoon character. And then let's think he's got the cut off sleeves. So this arms and come over here a couple of wrinkles here. So again, throw those lines. If you have a tough time getting clean lines, you know, work more from. I'm still working from my wrist, I would say, but don't be afraid to shoulder a little bit more quite a bit more and I gotta think about this other hand, kind of what that looks like. That doesn't need to be some kind of exact cemetery to it. But I still want to peer back and forth, you know, paying attention to what's over there. There's some not being lazy here. I don't want toe. Look at my working. You know, I think I'm a lazy artist. I do work from home, though, so that's nice. OK, so three fingernails. Let's at least make sure that he's got three over here. I think that's always a good idea. Another way to get smooth lines is too Concentrate, obviously, but just kind of nice, slow, steady pull. So I think that takes a little bit more of just practice. So when you get to an area or a degree of where you've done enough of this stuff, you kind of focus in draw your lines more fluid that way. But again, don't beat yourself up. If you can't do that, focus on some quick polls just like that sweeping quick polls. You're going to get some pretty neat lines by doing that anyways, so you really want to practice? Ah, you wanna practice at all Multitude of ways to express your lines, but yeah, those quick polls Kenly save the day. So sure, if you have, ah, shaky hand, it kind of regulates that a little bit. I think there's definitely days where I've had too much coffee, and I need to employ that technique a little bit more. Okay, so there's one hand and it's gonna be a little bit different. This pinky looks strange. It was supposed to be actually supposed to be leaned over. So let's see if we can fix that. Or else I will look like a lazy artist. So better. And since we're working digitally, let's just go ahead and move this guy up like that. Looks more little more accurate and race back the overlap. Make sure it's not on a selection tool. And I know you traditional artists going. Wait a second. I can't do that part. I know. I know. There's certain things that is just gonna have to get out the old light table on Dio, but hopefully still get the the main purpose of this Ah, Siris of lessons. Okay, so now we've got that arm in place. Um Let's go and do this other arm over here like So let's just go back up here and start from this horn thing is still don't you know if that's what it is? I guess that's gotta be what it is, right? Let's do this. Young is quick flips of lines. Try to keep the thinnest line uh, still relatively thick, I think so. You see how the speed really reflects in the way the line lands on the page. So even something like this let me demonstrate with the horn here, let's rotate. This could actually pull a little bit better on a downward kind of pull and liner push polio. But be it from this point down, something else you can do is you can actually pull dot well dot down here just real tiny, and you can practice just hitting that line. You see, it's pretty tricky to Dio. That's why it requires some practice, but you'll notice. Generally you're gonna get more energy tow line, and you just race back when you need Teoh. We have lots of ways to kind of exercise your ability to do this, some like that, and we want these tiny little details. Another thing is to make sure that you just have some variation tow lines themselves. So for texture lines, you know, go nice and thin. So that definitely doesn't. Ah, all kind of blend together a nice, heavy line back here again. I could add a layer real quick, draw through this and race back. Make sure you get all the little lines remnants of that line. And let's look at this Children piece over here. Let's get some of this and kind of fight the urge to have all these going the same direction, but again, simplify So some areas you could just have a go straight across and it could have a taller kind of ripped there. Little things like that. The opening for the arm could be just two overlapping lines. Get those in place. Here we go. Even do like a little line up like that. Something almost looks like a, uh in a tuna when you rip it open with a candle. I don't know. Maybe not. And for the arm. Now, remember, I've got two layers here. I'm gonna command e mergers together, had one more layer, and I really just want to focus on this arm. So what happens is I think the layer is really aid you in the process and allow you to, you know, not get so caught up in one drawing, throwing him hitting this other area. And I got to be careful that you really want to alleviate that kind of worry as you do this , and that's where these layers can help. Now, you see, it's kind of hard for me to draw this line the way that I want. So I want to rotate the page toe where I'm most confident with my line making, and that would be right here. You see almost mail that the first time. So that's really the difference of making sure that you've got your mechanics, um, the right, you know, you're working with the way that you generally like to create, not against it. So let's get that elbow and right about there. Sometimes it's fun to leave a little point like that. Maybe we'll go with that. Maybe not. I really want a nice, heavy line right there. So just to race that back, and they said it might be fun to leave that little point there. So another thing that happens as you start to do this, you start to incorporate more range of what you guys, he said. There's a lot of curves here except for the hair eso That little point to the elbow, I think, adds. A little bit of character, actually matches a bit of the shape of the the horn up there. Eso let's go ahead and continue to the next lesson. We're finished thinking this. Talk a little bit more about line, weight, variation and things like that, and then we'll get this ready for color. So let's move on to our next lesson. 5. L4 Inking Our Monster Concept Part 2: Okay, so let's continue to in car, little monster Dude here. Still working off a floating layer there. Get a couple of these lines in and you'll notice like anything else. As you do this, you start to pick up speed. You start to kind of get in the zone a little bit. It starts to feel the flow in the I think what happens to is just kind of a realization of what you're after. So it becomes a lot easier to execute that verse. In the beginning. You're still kind of making all these choices and what I really want to see on the page here. But then as you get to the end result, closer and closer, you, ah, start to become a little bit more sure of what you're after now on this side, he's got more fingers, decide. It's more just big spikes. So I need to kind of extend a little bit of the padding of a finger and add a spike. But I'm not going to redraw that. It's pretty simple. So I'm just gonna do this here and kind of fake it. Hopefully, it still reads Well, some picture in these parts being the fleshy part of the Finger Scalea part, and then just add those spikes. So it's one of the neat things about doing animated characters is it doesn't all have to be exact. And even with these details noticed that I'm doing this little thing where I do a thicker line and I have it taper back off to a better line, just another style choice. I don't know if there's a right or wrong way to do that. I just think it looks cool. So I had a few more of those. And for here I want these to be tinier lines by comparison. So you see how thick that wedge work is to the bottom of the arm. I want these to be nice and then because they're just basically texture, you know, maybe another series of scales on the back of the arm there, so I want them to read differently. Then that other line work. And again, this is just preference. Well, there's that complete little marks appear. That's funny. I always think of different cartoons that I watched as a kid, as I do this, and I'm getting very much a, uh, Freddie Flintstone feel to this one. So it's funny how some of that comes back is you're starting to draw something, and I probably just divulged my age by talking about the cartoons that I enjoyed as a kid. Oh, well, all right, So now the shoulder piece comes over the collar, I should say, and I think it would be funny to have it tucked under the, uh, the chin, which I've got the chin a bit higher or what looks like a chan, I guess. But let's go ahead and bring this back, and we'll just have a role that comes in front of the shirt. So no limits on roles there, right? We could have as many as we need on this creature, so we'll just say something like that and some wrinkles on the shirt. Little belly button kind of looks like analogy. Then in the bottom of the belly kind of hit the floor, which I think will be funny and now for some pudgy little feet with spikes on them. So what I'll do here is just kind of like a line for how it's whatever you might think a leg might fit back there. Whatever That's like a backwoods leg. And it's hell. So just something like that. And then maybe just a fat kind of rounded pad of the foot. It comes out like this and then we'll just attach some large toenails toe that spikes, I should say. So let's see how we want to attach these. Something like this. Now look strange, actually. Let's do this. Or on another floating layer, let's merge that. Let's add one more. And then again, this kind of just give me a little bit more ease of mind. As I draw through these, I could even use this in clearer as another drawing layer, obviously and kind of place him and then drove the top again. But I don't think I need to. We'll see here. Um, like that. Bring this down again. Here, I'm gonna draw through. This is to get the line. I want a race back race back here. Then attach this like this. Look weird. Hopefully it does, because weird is what we're after. No, it looks a bit too weird. So let's go ahead and bring this back. Gonna bring all this up? Probably could have just selected that brought it up from what I'm thinking. But what I want to do here, I'm gonna start from this side. So this is another thing I thinks helpful. It's not working from one direction. Try from another. Yeah, I like that. Actually paying back and check it. Yeah, it's fun. We'll do that. Okay, so now we've got a big crazy foot here. Looks like this. The thing could walk, but that's all right. And let's kind of emulate this on the other side. So big, huh? Explain toe over here somewhere. You see, I need to work on my toes, some struggling. But again, if I am struggling, I could just revisit this with one more layer. Convert this to a blue line, and it should be a bit easier. But I am also fighting again the mechanics of the way I draw. So I want to tell this guy and just away where it becomes easier for me to create the lines that I want. Main reason. It's triggers because I want this all to be one continuous line for the locum. After there's something like that and notice that I sprawled those toenails out of bed. I did that intentionally, just to give it a bit more character and hopefully sprawl as an actual word. Okay, so now let's bring this up. Thank you. I want to think in this line a little bit more. Bring us up and connect up like this. There we go. Now let's finish the tail. So for here, I just want hopefully to get these nice, quick lines for each side would be awesome would be a big time saver. But, you see, I'm actually struggling to get that. So we're gonna do is start from this side again. If it's not working from one direction, try it from another. Always mix it up. And what I think I'm gonna have to do is actually go for 1/2 way point. So again, why? I kind of thought about a dot you know, point a to point b kind of thing, and I want to get to right there. What emerges together? Another layer. And if not, you're just gonna draw these nice and carefully with your brush panel. Whatever. Using. Traditionally. So you see on this one, I'm just going for a slow steady. Is the pace kind of move? Try to blend those lines together. Okay, so now again with texture, want to think about the lines? We did appear for the horn, even though there's the different area of the the creature. I'm still thinking of this kind of like similar pattern. It was like a a positive tail. Armadillo really got a learn. My animals say something like that. We're gonna let the color fill in the gaps. So there's that. And let's bring out the detail of the shirt like this exclamation point and a few more details, and we will be ready for color. So hopefully you could see that this isn't to offer long over process. I mean, could have been done a lot quicker. Sure. Am I going slower because I'm talking? Definitely. But ah, it's it should be fun. That's the main thing when doing this type of drawing on, why any type of trying, Really, I should just be a lot of fun, so just make sure that you're being expressive with your lines, being creative with your ideas and I'm fun and the end result should be fun looking. Hopefully. So there's that. I noticed him trying to ADM or shaped each one of these segments. Now it's almost like once the horn on this creature has gotten bigger, it's become more detailed in the sense more, more shape to it. I don't know if that's a good idea, just an idea, but I will try it. So yet and I also liked it. You almost takes another bend as well, almost like as this creature gets older May this horn just keeps twirling around like a a ram's horn or something. I'm like, Damn! Okay, so now for the phase, which generally I probably would work on the face first, but for some reason, I save that for last. Ah, so let's get thes spike tooth. So I think it's fun. Little bit of us. Tiny smirk there. Try to get some of these lines all the way across. Fight the urge toe sketch with your inks, but I don't know. I've seen it done so many different ways. You just do whatever feels right, and we'll eyebrows again. The color will kind of fill in a lot of these little parts to, so I just want to get little hands of the detail we're talking about and notice that the cheeks are really just a straight line across. That could be a fun little cartooning style. So I had a new layer there so I can draw right through it. Make sure those line line up perfectly in a race, a bag, which is all that line a little bit. And then let's bring the eyes. I mean, figures. I'm struggling on my eyes. Come on. All right, let's that one more layers to us again. You know, little better anyways. Now, another thing for at least us digital people is getting the size of the canvas right for what you're drawing could be a big help. I like to position it just where I need it and work at just the size that I want to work at . Something like that. A little bit of a shadow at the bottom and a little bit of a glare right there and again. I want this other side just to be a bit smaller. I just think it will be but more interesting for the character. I'm like that. I just think it's funny if his eyes were different sizes. Well, freckles, Ozcan just be DATs. There we go. So just like that. We've got our cute, little cuddly, maybe slightly dangerous monster. And now we get to add some colors and have fun with that. So let's move on to the next lesson. 6. L5 Adding in Our Flat Colors: All right, So now for the fun part, adding some color. Yeah, right. It's all fun. So what we want to do here is murder line. Work together like so at a layer in between. Or, you know, again, if you're working traditional, this might just be markers or something for you. But basically, what I want to do is just add some primary colors. Um, so we bring over a color editor here, and they don't need to be the exact colors, but you want a flat and some kind of idea almost thinking like I want this creature to be like a purple, lavender or something. But again, we can change this pretty quickly, but it means a solid brush. I'm just gonna pick certain parts. So, for instance, I'm going to start with, you know, this area of the creature, and you can draw on selections first, or just draw in Ah, black in some colors. One thing you can do is actually just fill in larger areas and then come back. Ah, lot of people actually fill in the entire area and then just chop the color, and that's probably the better way to do it. for certain work flows. But I've never had to do it for my work. So and I've worked with a lot of different clients. I don't know what the difference is. I think it's trapping and bleeding of colors. But when I got to get in all that stuff, I was gonna have fun. Here in color are creature dude, but the main thing is is by generating full flats or whatever, you can create selections really quickly. You can make changes to the color palette really fast. So, like you can start with one idea when it pertains to color, and they're just moving to something else. So I definitely think that this is the best way to get started. I was just blocking some flag colors because it seems like if you just start painting, especially if you don't have a good understanding of your paint process, you can come up with something less than desirable. But if you flat it in and then work with basic shapes and colors up from there, you can kind of see where it's going. Kind of makes some good decisions. Ah, lot of times all like something just the stage of the work. It'll pretty cool. So just with some flats in there, So to do this, they seem just working up the line. Work. Is that line work, too? Make it easier when your kid trying to color and stay within the lines right and again we could just fill in. Yeah, I'll show you what I mean There, I guess we'll just fill in. Let's just go to the edge. But we could fill in past the nails, and then as long as the next layer is the color we need for the nails, then that's all we really need to worry about. But the only difference is if you go to use a blending mode, you got to be aware of what color is over top of the Underland color. So in this case, we will go ahead and just go to the very edge of the skin color. For that reason, you see, I just you know, there's no line right there. It doesn't matter. You can still just use the edge of the color to connect the dots. It's like that, and I probably should have did this earlier in the video, but let me do this and show you the settings to this brush quick, Just in case yours is any different. You could just copy those settings has advanced was basic, and this brush is actually just the way it comes. So there's no need to really show you that, but here it is. Those were predominantly the two brushes that I use. I don't really do a lot of my paint work in this software you can keep in mind. You could do any of these art forms in any program. My phone. It just takes a different approach. Uh, whatever you might be using, but they all have some more tools. Summer, obviously a little bit more focused in certain areas, have more tools. And others, you know, may have just good at one specific thing. Like one of things that led me to this program was the drawing was exceptional right out of the gate with very little knowledge of the program and how to modify it. So that kind of it was nice for me in the beginning because I was able to just get started with it and not worried too much about interface and controls and adjustments and all that . I think all those things creating custom brushes any of that stuff. So But after I worked at it longer and longer, I found that. All right. You know, a variety of other tools were more beneficial for certain things. Okay, So back to this obviously sorry from deviating. Um, so we're getting in this flood of color, you know, our purple layer and I could have sped through this, but I always felt bad doing that. When people are learning, you know that that if I time lapse and speed through it, too much of it, maybe you lose some of that information. Sums lost in translation. So hopefully this isn't too boring for you. But that's kind of why I'm doing real time. And let's color the tail differently. We'll kind of go with the secondary color. So I have to have to get this purple in place, and I think that's about it. It's double check it here. Yeah, that should be good. Let's do our secondary color of the characters. So I'm gonna create a new layer I don't pick a bit of Ah, my bone like color. Something like this. And what's going do two things. Color spike, stuff like that. And again, don't worry. Too much of this isn't exactly the right color because you're gonna have plenty of opportunity to, or it's pretty easy to change it regardless. So another way to color this is while some people like to color pass the line and race back . I've seen that technique. I don't use that myself, but it's pretty easy to dio. There's probably certain areas of the work where it makes sense to do that. So just be aware of that and again. The other way is to generate selections. But I I find it just a tad faster or more enjoyable, maybe to just draw it in. This is just the way I do it in this particular program. What was that? So I could get rid of the Blue Line at this point, But I'm actually just using that, uh, his reference. But I really don't need it anymore. So just get that out of there, like, right there ago passed something just he raised back, okay? And I think we're gonna make the tail this color as well. You see, when I go over that purple since I'm on the top. Most layer. It exposes that Messi coloring of mine. You see, the white is pretty easy to read, but another technique is just to block and some color for your background. So you just want to make sure that you don't end up with these tiny little light gaps. Like I got a little bit in the purple right there. I don't need to check that as I go, but they're pretty easy to touch up. So right now, I just want to get these based colors in place. Keep in mind you're welcome to tell me, uh, you know Hey, I thought the area where you blacked and all the color could have been time lapse. I'm always open to constructive criticism and improvement of these lessons. But like I said, I always feel like if students trying to learn you need to show them exactly what I'm doing . And no better way to do that than real time. So you are. You be the judge, though I know it's easy to get bored just watching somebody do something an actual time. Okay, so we're almost there. Most we got. We've got the shirt here we go and eyes things like that. So we're just gonna keep building up from here, so no with sure. Let's go ahead and pick another color. And I'll tell you, I'm not even sure what I want to see their for the shirt color. So I'm just gonna pick something. So I'm just going to start with this light blue kind of baby blue. But it's not definite. I'm just gonna go right through the exclamation point here and see Now, those lines are actually distraction because of the same color as the shirt. So we definitely don't want those there now. - And his title details. Okay, there's the shirt. I guess we could add one Maura and a dark blue for right here on the exclamation point. Who knows? This might be filled in black or something else, But we'll just start with that. Uh, now, another thing that you can do If you want to be conservative of your layers, let me actually go back while I'm here and select. Hold Alz like that purple and fill into his edges. But if you want to be conservative, your layers you can use the same layer even with a different color. I'll actually use the shirt layer of those since the blue that I'm liking and we can go in color in the eyes zealously. Hierarchy is where you need it. Then this works just fine. And then we could even take the explanation layer sample from the background and get the whites of the eyes top going over there so you can make good use of your layers like that, basically, actually, the white back here, which, you know this actually needs to be a gray, So let's have one more layer. You want to really fight the urge to use too much white, you know, just give things slight off colors and whether b a little bit of touch of yellow in there. But then what happens is you can come back with a little bit of white in your coloring of this process is well, but it's real easy to overdo things like, you know, the whites as let's just put weight l all the way through there and then it doesn't read as well. So there we've got our base colors to our character. Eso This is again known as flats and allows you to get, um, your selections. Lot easier. Now we're gonna add some or shadows and some details and really start to bring this little dude a life. So let's move on to our next lesson. 7. L6 Applying Highlights with Cell Shading: Okay, so now we're gonna add in some more color. So the neat thing about working like this is that any of these areas now could be locked to make painting and adding more color a lot easier, or even making transitions of the color or variations. So, for instance, I hit lock right there. Whenever I paint with another color, it's not gonna go outside of their in that case, Ah. Lack of color. Yes. So it won't go outside of their. So I could easily jump in here and say, Well, I want thes scales to be a different color. I don't have to worry so much about you know where that's hitting Only on the inside. It's not going to go past that, edges. I'm gonna hit that other color of the tail. So pretty easy. Way to color right there. Now, the other thing I like to do when I do this is I'll actually start with just a big soft brush. So let's find something like the airbrush here. Let's hold all select this color. Let's pick a darker version of it, and let's scale this brush to a size where you see how big it is where I can just start with some base shadows, so usually shade from the bottom up. We'll start down here and you'll see when you do this, it'll start to expose little areas that you missed a swell. A little bit of a drop shadow from the shirt. No, that's actually too thick. Let me go back there. Skillet brushed down little drop shadow from the shirt shed on the bottom of the hand on the arm here. The other thing that you can dio is you can isolate. So you see this purples been isolated, you know, by the edges of the other colors, basically. But the other thing that you can do if you need to isolate a certain part of, you know, so you want to isolate this arm because you want a shadow just above that selection or something, you can just I'm sorry it actually select other air for what I was trying to attention eso You could select that area. Let's go this selection So he's the last so around it, and then grab your brush tool and you could just paint just in that area. I really don't want to do that. But I'm just trying to show you how you're not just subject to the lack transparency here. You can use that in conjunction with the last hole selection tools. Make sure that these ones, these ones, will drop their for just for transformations. So just little things like that to help you paint a bit more effectively. Yes. Look, See a shadow on the bottom of this part of the arm. We just got a picture where a light source would be and just start to kind of had a bit more depth tore design. That's actually too big of a shadow there. I'm using the bracket keys on my keyboard to scale the, uh, brush up or down for what I want. There we go. Okay, so there's our base shadow for the purple. OK, and now what I want to do is do a little bit of cell shading is what I like to call it, or I think it's referred to as, and I want to grab just like areas where I picture a little bit of light source and I'm gonna grab a lighter tone now, quite a bit later and skill that brush up and hit those areas. And what I'm doing is just creating another style of light source or highlights. And these could be as detailed as you want him. Uh, there's just kind of fun. Teoh Dio again. Make sure you stay over to this side or can't paint with it. She's for selecting an era. You can also hold, shift and add to these areas so you don't have toe specifically select paints like to paint . It gets kind of mind numbing at times, but there are times that you want to do that. So what's going? Zoom up here, Command Z to go back to our selection pain again because you don't want all of these two kind of affect the same way. In fact, I think that even there is a good example of where I want to do these individuals, I'm gonna rotate this free and over and grab my selection tool again. We'll start from the edge here, actually want a little bit of a light source on the very edge like this. We'll paint that first and you can see I kind of went over. I'm gonna unlock my transparency there and a raise back right there. So I touch up a Zago, remember to lock it again. Grab the selection tool and let's grab this next area Brochin some of that color and one more time Vocero brush wings. Make sure to grab your airbrush each time. That's not the airbrush status just like that. And just try to mix it up. And you can also add this on a floating layer, which I'd probably recommend if you're a little bit less confident with this process. So just remember that I'm working on the exact layer right there. But I could all also add a layer. And but now I don't have the lot transparency, uh, future helping me. So I got to make sure that both sides of my selection are in the right place. And again remember to grab this one. I kind of wish this software didn't have those two variations of selection, but it does. But yes. And Aiken brush that in. But I got to make sure my overlaps are incorrect. And the other thing that I have by doing this is I can now control blending modes as well. So you do lots of neat little effects with that, but I'll just keep it to normal for now. So now let's come over here. Keep going with our A little bit associating, and I'll go ahead and hold shift crab the top portions of this character's foot. Remember that with the airbrush, you could really just scale it down as well. And then it's gonna give you a little bit more control to maybe paint these and differently . So if it's a larger brush, it's gonna kind of affect all three of them the same. You just have to play around with some variation in there. And since that is on another layer, you also have the ability to knock these back, maybe with the softer race, to make him a little bit more faint in certain areas. So that's a pretty neat advantage. Layers air generally, the way to go when doing this, and you can also take another area and you can create a stronger light source. So if you really wanna draw some attention to his belly, um, just save whatever colors rats so you don't paint yourself into a corner. Basically handle skillets brush up. I'll just hit this belly right there, check it from a distance, You know, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't again. It's on that floating layer so I can knock this back a little bit. I want to slowly work up to this again. Subtlety is kind of everything. When doing artwork, you know, you just really want to slowly watch things come together. You know, you pick up speed as you get more advanced with your work. But you really want to watch this stuff come together and make your best decisions. I was kind of getting in some shapes here for the highlights like that, and then back to the airbrush back to my previous color. But I want to save each color, create waste, not want, not something like that. Brush that in there, commanded to de select it on the chin here. And you can also grab other areas like appear with the hair that are obviously far away from that chin. That's not gonna matter. And I could paint both of those just again to save time. Get this done. Ah, in a reasonable on the time. Anyways, we'll highlight on the nose. Probably. Andi, I think in some circles for the cheek my laconic. You will see something like that. So it's just having fun with it and then just figuring this out and you can keep going as far as you need, Teoh. And remember, there's certain things you can bring out like friends. It's if I want to make this lipstick out a little bit more. There doesn't need to be a shape there for me to add color to it. Do that and then, you know likewise, I could shade the top portion and I could start to bring out a little bit more depth. Then, you know, it wasn't really there was just a line basically so lots of ways to really, you know, keep picking this apart and bring it out and give it up a little bit more life. Okay, so let's continue to add in a few more of these highlights, and then we will brighten up this with some more effects, more color, because it it just looks to plane. But it's going to start off that way. We're just building up to our process here, so let's try something like that, and that gives us our base highlights for the purple Now keep in mind to. You can also draw in somewhere. Highlights actually recommend that so little areas like this Just grab a solid brush kind of draw to the one side of the line work. Maybe you can add into what's already there. So little things like that could be formal textures. Just keep that in mind that you could draw and airbrush these in theirs. Not really a one single way that you need to approach this. I do like a head slight. You know, things like that could be fun as well. Tell me a little, Well, that's here and there. Okay, so there's Ah, actually, I don't like those times. Let's go back. Okay, So another thing we can do is we can just add another layer over top of this. Let's put over all our color and let's pick a little bit more off kind of a magenta. And let's try to brighten up this creature. Let's take a softer raise, and we'll just kind of brushed through the middle here so we can add a little bit in the cheeks, chan the belly wherever, really, and we just want to live in 11. This character up a little bit. This looks a bit too playing with just that one color. So this is a great way to kind of, you know, introduce another color and make him feel a little bit more alive and energetic. Eso You gotta be careful of how you brush over and use your selections and race back or whatever by if you just paint on the inside of that because you got to remember, this is a floating layer, and you can also use the blending mode here so you can try all sorts of neat little effects and see what you get. And color is probably gonna be the best. Let's check that against normal. Yeah, I think color blends a bit better, so we'll keep adding to it. But that's just kind of the process where you just keep building up layer upon layer. Now it's probably a good ideas. Well, to throw a layer behind all this and just pick some sort of background color, whatever you want to use just to distinguish, and this will help you. If you paint over a certain thing, you might see a bit better, so we'll just kind of brushed some color I'm back there. Just, ah, have a better read on the way our creature is coming together. They will also attach a drop shadows so he doesn't look like he's floating. But there we go. So now we've got, you know, start on our colorization process, and we're just gonna keep working from here, and everything is going to kind of propel us forward. We're going toe do this by comparison. So each time we add, something will compare that to ah, you know, other aspects of our design. So with that, let's move on to the next lesson. 8. L7 Adding Color to the Spikes and Scales: Okay, so now with the horns, I want to show you how you can keep drawing in information. So let's go to that layer. And let's race back any of these little imperfections here. So again, that's where that background layer of color kind of helps you to see. Any of the flaws that weren't as evidence is before, just kind of glance over the work. Check it as you go. Okay, so now let's draw in with a solid brush. Let's hold all. It's like the color that we have. Let's pick a little bit of a shadow color. Let's just draw in somebody shape so we could easily generate a selection like we're doing before. But sometimes it could be fun just to draw in these colors. It's like that. I just have to think about what's Thea the most effective use of your time. But then the end result is well, you know, was it looked better when you do this is to have more of ah, natural organic feel, basically like you can see, it was more done by hand, less mechanical, so a bit more flow to it. I think that tends to give it a bit more energy anyways in a good variety to the way that you created. Yes, So if we draw that in, you can get in some of the shadow. I always think about shadow elements from each thing again. This is a cartoon type style, so it's not that it has to be any kind of idea of perfection. But you know, you want to think about your light source, your shadows, and you want to bring things out dimensionally, and this is a good way to do it, just kind of drawing these little shapes of shadows. I kind of like this little glare at the top. That's more of a style choice now. The other thing I could do is make sure that I'm locked right there and again I won't go outside of the edges of the this particular layer. It's probably a good idea to Dio, so we could say that this not only has a shadow here, but it gets blocked by the next fingernail above it. So maybe these ones air bottom was completely in Chateau Little things like that. So you can you can try to incorporate a little bit of an idea of what you think about realism into something like this. That could be fun to Dio. It's not necessary, but I think it's It's kind of neat when you see styles that do that really well where they have a nice mixture of cartoon and realism. So instead of just giving everything that's entirely similar shadow, I could start thinking Well, you know, wouldn't this foot over here be completely in shadow base with light? Source says. And something like that Simple is, that is, sometimes it can make things read pretty well. We could do a nice big shadow from the creature from the cereal, and then again, we can bring out these Ridgelines. Are these segmentation zones. It's like that. Have a nice shadow going across here. So you see that that portion probably made more sense just to color in my hand. I see you got a little hiccup there. Let's fill that in and let's go ahead and add one more over top now, and I could again I could draw this on that same layer, but just to give us ah, one more area of at it room for at it was put in a little bit of light source here. It doesn't have to be all that detailed are great. Just something you see a little bit of it over here a little. Here. You do want to be very sparingly with your light sources. They have more impact. Like, for instance, when you had the little white highlights at the very end of a design, Make sure those are very, um uses very well. Various, apparently. Okay. And one more thing that I want to see with the character here is I would like to this at another color for these scales. I just think he still looks a bit playing, and we got to call the shirt and eyes and things like that. But I want to add one more layer for those scales and I'm gonna try. Mm. Maybe that magenta again. But while I'm experimenting here, let's say he's he likes to match is close to his scales. Let's try that at my look kind of me, but just spitballing here. This may not be the right choice, but since we added this on another layer, it's really easy to edit that maybe that'll be the thing I'll show you here as well. And when in doubt, zoom up since I'm missing Ah, the lion work. It's a bad thing about making thin lines in the work. You gotta be a little bit more careful and precise about your application of color like that and rotate one needed. And I would say this area doesn't have to be that exact, either. It's kind of more of a texture, but I wanted to match the pattern that I've drawn out now. I could just erase back those lines as well, so just remember there's really no right or wrong way. This is kind of more texture ing, and if the color itself reads well by itself, then I could just get rid of the lines. But I think I want to keep those lines. We'll see here, but I do want to show you how you can quickly at it something like this. It was really no wasted time. When you're doing this again, it's all by comparison. It's all you know, add and judge or add and examined the work and then make the next best judgment call and just keep propelling yourself forward case. Let's see if that's all the little scale designs there, and I think that adds to it. Definitely. I think it's not as boring. But there's other things we can do. We can night back capacity, we can change the blending mode and we can adjust the hue. We can change the color itself so we can take this like transparency. Let's try that Magenta was talking about Let's put this back to normal first. And then let's just take a large brush and draw right through there. So you see, you can make a lot of little adjustments on the fly and you can really test this and go, OK, you know what? Maybe some green, maybe like a hawk wasp. Let's go in between this like a greenish uh, that's actually just more green, as in that, Let's get a little bit more aqua in there, kind of like that. But again, the main thing is that you can really just keep toying around with this on and get a nice variety of what you're looking for and then play a deal. Pass that you might want something very subtle like that, Um, and then you because it's a separate layer, you can keep painting end of these as well. But really, I want this to just be a subtle type, texture so might just not get back to something like that. All right, so now let's head over to the next lesson. Keep refining this. Paint this little dude shirt and see what we come up with, so let's move on. 9. L8 Adding Color to the Shirt: all right, so not a paint the shirt. So same thing. Let's kind of isolate the layer. Lock transparent pixels. Let's start painting. Let's just grab the soft brush. Let's hold Ault. Flick that area. Grab a deeper tone, probably a little less saturated as well. Just remember, if you go left to right, you're talking the saturation up and down this brightness to the color and then your color wheel on the outside. Ah, and then each color you picked. Just remember to grab this, drag it down here, and it makes it easy for editing. So I like to do like I think I've already mentioned. But I like to do the first kind of overall shadow just to get things fleshed out in a sense , and you could scale down the brush with the bracket keys. I'm using the left bracket key to scale it down. I could throw in some shadows where the wrinkles are. I always think soft shadows work decent for this area and a little bit of drop shadow from his big old nag in there. So just kind of simple nothing to crazy into ah detail, but just enoughto get some idea going on there for, you know, the material not looking so flat. Even just adding a shadow right to the edge with line work is if you notice Ah, right there. It just kind of devils it in the sense. And then you can also take your selection tool. You know, our even quicker still will just take the solid brush and we'll just kind of draw in a little bit of shadow right here. And we could probably just look at this like a plane change. So another great way to color is just really thinking about the differences of planes. So this being a flipped up material is going to be on the other side of the light source, pretty much so. You could just do a plane change kind of effect, take off lock transparency and clean up some of these edges real quick has got to be more careful not to go outside of the edge. And then I could leave just a little bit of light. Maybe the one edge of that, something like that. I could hold all. Select that over here, and I could trim back some of this color if I wanted to, you know, little things like that. Nothing to advance their. But sometimes you can make something appear a little bit more wall thought out just by doing little tricks like that. What kind of touch up these edges here. And I could even say Well, maybe want it even a little bit darker. Keep in mind to You can eat. It's kind of mixed color. I don't do this a lot, but I just want to show you you could select the black. You could paint there with a little bit less opacity, re select it painted again and see how it's kind of slowly lightening up. You could select that lighter version and we basically just mixed this color with black. So just a quick again. I'm not gonna get too far into that because I don't do that a lot with this type of illustration. But I want to show you it is possible to make sure on color as you go and kind of not always resort to jumping over to your palate so kind of paint that back. So again, holding all just selecting from existing palette. Now, I do like this tone that I mixed, so I might come over here and say, Well, I think there should be a little bit of that shadow. I'm gonna lock transparent pixels again like transparency. And I want to get a nice little shadow over here just to kind of push out that belly. I feel like that's, Ah, cool, comical parts of the character. I could think about a drop shadow from that kind of spiky. Ah, caught in the shirt there. Maybe some of that I could bring that shadow into here. I could bring some drop shadow over here. I could think about this shadow from the head coming over. So lots of interpretation here and guesswork. It's never I don't think there's an exact area that stuff needs to go like it needs to be placed right here and right there. But you could make some pretty educated guesses and get closer and closer so I can bring some of that shadow over here. A little on the edge is kind of spruce up what we got going on over here, and I'd probably really want to use the mid tone so noticed that I pretty much just have three tones really and maybe a little bit of brighter light source over here and actually want to bring that out more now. So let me do that. But I my first finish say that, you know, you really want to kind of keep it conservative and three tones can actually convey a lot. Um, I kind of want to see some of this light color right in that blue. Let's see if that will look good. It might not, but I just wanna punch that up. Maybe we'll leave for now. So what I wanna do is go back here and I want to introduce a little bit more of a light source on the shirt. So what I wanna do is generate a selection like this. Just kind of picture in a highlight right there. Hold shift. A little one right there. And a little one right there. Just kind of picking and choosing where I want to see a little bit of highlight, something like that. Hold space bar and scroll back. Let's grab the airbrush and let's hold all select the brightest color and go a touch brighter than that. And let me punch up the size of the brush with the bracket keys and just put a little bit of a light source right there. Yeah, and see how it just kind of it looks a bit fake, but I like that. It's like a a cartoony, kind of glare kind of thing. You keep going with that. You can keep selecting smaller and smaller bits of this and really keep refining that. But I kind of like that right there. And we could also take this time to, you know, put another layer in, grab a solid brush, maybe grab a darker blue, and we could do something fun like, um, a pattern or something. We go even darker. So you could say, Maybe he's got a striped shirt on and you know these air Nice because they kind of help you give more, um, form or death to the work because you can take these lines and you can try to curve them just ever so slightly. Or maybe not even ever so slightly with Thea belly there. So it kind of brings out that that funny part of illustration where he's get this big old belly and a T shirt on with cut offs, which I think is just funny to me. But maybe not to you just to may, I don't know, but there it is. So little things like that can do a lot for it, you know? And then you could test and go Well, do I like it? With or without? I don't want to see it. Maybe bump up the brush size even more than actually grabbed the wrong brush there. Whoa, that's too big. Back down. But I actually meant to grab my solid brush. That was the pencil tool. So now I'll bring these ones over the other way. And, you know, now we've got this kind of plaid thing going on, so I don't know if I like that, but experimentation is fun. Um, actually went a little bit over the edge of the sleeve there. We don't want that. And again, you can play with the blending mold. You could play with the opacity, actually, don't like it, but I want to try and see. Sometimes you got to see it to know if I like it. And so we're getting there. We're getting a little bit closer to the end result of our creature design. Another thing I want to show you now is how to add in a final kind of kind of like what we did here with shirt, but a final hard shadow that could be really used all over the entire creature. And then we're going to clean it up by dropping and a drop shadows so he looks more connected to the floor plane and do some final touch ups. So with that, let's move on to our next lesson. 10. L9 Adding A Final Hard Edge Shadow: Okay, So another thing I like to dio and I could probably get away with Shadow and, um, some of the drop shot of the character and some of the shadows. What? I consider the kind of the final hard at shadows. So notice that, you know, we've got some soft shadows on parts like the arm. We've got a bit of ah, shape, shadow of the light source on then this hearted shadow that's on, you know the shirt. So it's kind of something I like to add, uh, all throughout as well. You can kind of see it on the horns to, but we could probably take that one more level. So one thing that you can do is you could just go to the top of whatever you're doing. Add one more layer, set the blending mode to multiply, grab a darker color. We'll just go with black in this case and start with the dark, solid brush. And so what this does It gives you another opportunity kind of drop in this solid line. And it looks strange right there, obviously, because it's ah, it's fully solid. But what I want to do is punch that back quite a bit, actually, towards very light. And you see, it just does this nice little added shadow. So you go through real quick and you can use a brush. You can use your selection tool, whatever you feel most comfortable with and whatever gives you the best and result. But you can kind of pass through everything with this. You don't need to stop like we're don't before. We're kind of coloring with the ah edges of a layer or whatever. In this case, you really don't need Teoh. You can just kind of put a shadow wherever you see another shadow. And what it's doing is it's just adding a little bit darker tone. Teoh each color. So you know, it's like a final drop shadows when I look at it. But like that, you know, just added on the mails bottom of poems here, whatever I want to do to kind of bring this out a little bit more. So you see all these effects kind of coupled together start to make this thing have a little bit more depth on the page, starts to pop off the page a bit more and look a bit more find you can go back into the dark over here again. It's gonna dark in anything. You apply it over. But actually what I'm thinking I want more like you like a shadow here. And I really do like just drawing this particular one. And it's not It's not too hard to dio Um, some of the, uh I think you get you get a nice variation if you do some drawn and some selected. And I pretty much do that with every app I use now. Ah, program or app. I really don't use all selections. I know some artists, dio, but again, it's kind of like what you feel most comfortable with, and I really like to just draw shapes. So I don't find this part to be too bad. And, you know, if you zoom and you're going to see imperfection because I've drawn us from distance, but I think that always goes back to what you're in result is for the artwork. So if this is gonna be print media and it's gonna be viewed at a high resolution up close, then I'm gonna zoom in a lot more, and I'm gonna be a lot more specific about the way I ah, apply these effects. But if this is going to be, um, you know, for Web Web viewing or something, then I'm not gonna be too worried about it. Because if it looks good from this distance, then that's pretty much the view of what the end result is. Because you're generally in Web graphics, Johnny, don't zoom up unless you kind of downloaded and they're studying it or whatever like that. But generally you're working at 72 Resolution 72 D P. I Oh, RPP, I should say. And, um, it was just a difference in what the end result is, so just always be aware of that. So it's printed media General, you're gonna be more of a perfectionist. So you see how this effect is pretty easy to do, and it adds a lot of flavor to the are. And I'm not even going with the other highlights and shadows. You don't always have to follow your steps and make everything perfectly aligned, especially cartoon type styles. Anyways, I think it's it's fun to kind of just be a little bit more forgiving of this stuff. I think a shadow over here. Look, done something like that. We could get some wonders Chubby cheeks here. You know, we can put some on the eyes that glare on the eyes, Probably on the wrong side, but I'm gonna live with it. I'm gonna show you how you can put this in place, but still makes me tweaks and adjustments with that as well. So probably get this whole side of the head here. Hadn't acts kind of all Just one big piece, just so that, you know, kind of rounds that over a bit more. It looks a bit plane. We can even get some of this in the eyes. And I just remember, the eyes are the whites of the eyes. Shouldn't be perfectly, you know, they shouldn't all be the same value. It's a lot more impressive. Put a few Ah, subtle value ranges in there, and then you can come back with just a tiny bit of white as you'll see here in a minute, and we'll Ah but that last little bit, we'll drop shadow the tooth just like that. And we could even get is detailed as we want. We could bring these scales out by giving those a little bit of, Ah, a shadow make him look like they're raised. Actually, don't want to do that, But I just wanted to think about all the opportunities you have to apply these effects and make things look pretty cool. You know, just always think about your light source. So if this is an outie bellybutton than the light source, the shadow is going to be on this side. If it's in any about by button, the shadow is gonna be on the inside like that. So it's it's really funny how a small thing like where the shadow is helps to convey in any war now D But you know what I mean. Hopefully, so s so now we're gonna dio let's at our drop shadow and I'm gonna actually I could put the drop shadow right here, as you can see And it's not bad, but I don't want to worry about going over the rest of the character when it's so easy to just go behind all this information. Where would be the final layer would be right? It's gotta be above this dark blue. We can add it right here, and we can start really dark, but again, it doesn't have to be dark. Not this dark anyway. So we'll just drop the opacity quite a bit. Maybe something in there, and then we can just kind of imagine, You know what? This shadow is gonna look like tail wraps around here. Maybe we see a little bit of that. Well, something like that. I actually don't know where the Shadow would be home based on these long toenails, but just gonna guess its place. It's something like that. And, you know, you got your hearted shadow. And if you wanted a soft bed shadow, you could erase this back. You could use your software brush to blend this very edge whatever you want to see their But I kind of like a mix all have a hearted shadow there. And then you see some of that purple. It's funny, like each time you add something, that's where it exposes the next thing you need to fix. So it's kind of a neat thing about adding to your work is you just keep realizing, you know, different things that need to be edited, so it gives you perspective on what you need to do next, Just like that. Okay, lets go and wrap this. Listen up here. Head over to the next lesson where we'll do a final touch ups and complete the artwork, so let's move on. 11. L10 Finishing Touches to the Work: all right. So no, for our final touch ups will just basically, uh, let's add another layer over time. And this is kind of world. Add the final white. If there's much in the design. Eso I save white for the very last. It's kind of like the, you know, icing on the cake. You just want to add very little bits of it, and I'll generally add that right over the line work so noticed with the eyes there. I want this stronger glare on the one side, and I can use it. Also edge back any line work that I might want to at this stage. And I'll just put tiny little glares here and there of just are quite but almost, you know, never use it, or I use it very rarely eso that it's got impact. You just don't want to. It's really easy to want to put it everywhere, because it it's kind of a nice little effect, but you don't want overdo it. So a little bit turn there, and that's all we'll do for the white. And then, uh, I'm thinking of getting rid of the background. I just I wanted him place to, you know, definitely check areas like this where you can see the paintwork blending over a bit. So it's nice to be able to see that in case you don't see it against the white, you want to really check your work against many colors as possible. I will mess around with just punching back the capacity at first, but I think I'm just gonna get rid of it. Let me try one last thing, though. Let's try the erased tool. And maybe it's just Thea the Edge worker. Let's try this with a little less opacity, and you could do this a couple of ways. You could grab your smudge brush and and blend back some of this. I'm just trying to change the shape and see if that's what bothers me about it, but because sometimes you could just change the shape of something and make it look a bit better. But that's yeah, I don't think I like it, So I'm just gonna get that out of there. And with Shadow, I think we need to see a bit more shadow because it's such a big, big guy here. So let's go ahead and select this we get capacity, we're gonna turn the opacity all the way back up, make it solid. And I just want to add this big, rounded shape where his belly would be. Don't try that. He said that little fade as well. So you need to push that back in there like them. And just like that, we've got our little creature, dude all colored up and ready to go, So Ah, just other things you can think about. If you like to paint your line work, you can go to the line, work lock transparency with this like kind here and you can paint that various colors as well. I don't like to pay the line work on a cartoon style like this, but I do in some various effects or various ah illustrations at Ideo. So it is available if you want to do that. So hopefully these lessons have been beneficial for you. I'd love to know what you think as well as what you'd like to see in the future and be sure to share your work. And I'd be happy to give you my insight on it. So thanks very much for taking these lessons as always. Keep drawn, keep having fun and I will talk to you soon.